Quantifying and projecting boreal mammal response to landscape change

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Climate-induced landscape change is restructuring ecosystems resulting in biodiversity declines reminiscent of previous extinctions. This is compounded by anthropogenic disturbance as resource extractions expand into northern regions. Yet biodiversity management, protection, and conservation does not include anticipated future change affecting multi-species persistence. Canadian wildlife represent important nutritional, cultural, and symbolic sources for northern people and global conservation. These animals inhabit an ecosystem where polar amplification is increasing the frequency and severity of drought, forest fires, and permafrost thaw resulting in large habitat shifts. Data is scarce and hard to collect given the climate, and cultural preference to use non-invasive methods, yet important to understand real-world drivers to northern biodiversity change. Quantifying processes that determine where northern animals occur, forming predictions of anticipated changes, and comparing these predictions to future observations provides the opportunity to test fundamental ecological hypotheses while servicing critical applied ecological needs. Similar work on animal ecology has been conducted in many other ecosystems, with foundational work on northern species ecology already established. However, limited niche redundancy within northern systems paired with contemporary rapid and observable landscape change provides an important opportunity to test our understanding of changing biodiversity drivers in a predictive ecology approach. My long-term research goal is to predict animal response to spatially-explicit anticipated anthropogenic and natural landscape changes within an integrated framework of ecological forecasting. This will inform current management and conservation decisions through a quantitative ability to weigh trade-offs between current and anticipated future habitat - and population - conditions. This goal will be obtained through two short-term objectives: O1 quantifying drivers of animal distribution and demographic change, and O2 demonstrating limitations and appropriate applications of these relationships when used to predict population change. Objectives will be achieved by four Plans that quantify I the efficacy of protected areas and their surrounding landscapes for mammal conservation, II density and distribution of a northern data-limited species, III anticipated shifts of mammal resource use to natural and anthropogenic landscape change, while providing projections of IV wildlife habitat use and demography considering this knowledge. This research will establish advancements and insights into the potential for animals to access, use, and respond to resources as landscapes change. It will contribute to advances in applied ecology by quantifying and predicting the effects of key management strategies to aid short and long-term provincial, territorial, Indigenous, and federal socio-economic and conservation commitments.